Crime Fiction: Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina

Of the hundreds of novels I receive each year, I always look forward to the newest one by Denise Mina. Her writing is consistently fresh and compelling, and nobody wraps an important social theme around a challenging and topical plot line better than she does. Mina’s latest effort, Gods and Beasts (Reagan Arthur), will not disappoint her many fans.

This tale begins in a small post office in

Crime Fiction: Lehrter Station by David Downing

A classic cat-and-mouse game -- except it’s no game. David Downing’s latest novel, Lehrter Station (Soho Crime), chronicles days full of
promise, punctuated by nights full of peril, in a nation emerging from war and
pulled in many directions at once.

November 1945. World War II has ended, and people on both
sides of the conflict struggle to put the events of the previous five years
behind them

Crime Fiction: Beach Strip by John Lawrence Reynolds

Although there is no shortage of women authors whose protagonists are male, the reverse is seldom true. The Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin once told me that it was
difficult for male writers to write convincingly from a woman’s perspective. We
discussed why that was, and decided, somewhat disturbingly, that in many cases
men simply weren’t as perceptive as women. We moved on from that dark

Crime Fiction: Broken Harbor by Tana French

Broken Harbor is crime writer Tana French’s compelling tale about the horrific multiple-murder of a family in rural Ireland. But if gore is not your thing, don’t be put off: the crime has already occurred by the story’s opening, and Broken Harbor -- released earlier this month in Canada, and due out in the States on July 24 -- is very much a police procedural married to a classic whodunnit. Its

Crime Fiction: The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill

By the time he died in January 2012, British crime writer Reginald Hill had earned legions of fans worldwide for his engaging novels (and long-running TV series) featuring two improbably paired police detectives. Andy Dalziel (known as “Fat Andy,” but only behind his back) is opinionated, outspoken, sometimes rude and almost always politically incorrect; his university-educated, liberally

Crime Fiction: Breakdown by Sara Paretsky

(Editor’s note: The following piece comes from Jim Napier, a Quebec resident and newspaper columnist. His book reviews have been featured in several Canadian papers and on such websites as Spinetingler Magazine, The Rap Sheet, Shots, Crime Time, Reviewing the Evidence, and Type M for Murder. Napier also has an award-winning crime-fiction site, Deadly Diversions.)

Chicago-based crime writer Sara